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Simon Bull's
flair for art was first noticed when he won his first art competition at the age of six. Other childhood art prizes were to follow, including several in his teenage years and a national art students painting prize while he was at college.
At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school in the North of England with his elder brother. The next four years provided a heady cocktail of experiences for an impressionable young mind. The windswept loneliness of the red brick Victorian school, along with the tough regime of a religious educational institution where little time was allowed for recreation, contrasted with times of adventure at home in South America. Home was a rambling white colonial house on brick pillars, with floors of polished wood.
The fringes of the rainforest provided the young artist with a wonderland of sight and sound. It was a world of color and mystery, the cathedral like pillars of the forest trees and the swollen rivers adding a note of darkness and danger to the enchanted wilderness.
During his teens the family moved to Hong Kong for several years. It was here that he first encountered the art of the East where the beauty of Chinese brushwork with its economy of line and energy of composition was to have such a lasting influence on him. It was here also that he held his first one-man exhibition at the age of eighteen. The success of that and other subsequent shows was to lead Simon into a lifetime career in art.
While still at art school he married Joanna, his childhood sweetheart. As time passed the economic challenges that faced the growing family were many, but always there would be some buyer who saved the day, some last minute commission that turned up. During the late seventies and early eighties the skills in printmaking that he acquired at art school and which had especially fascinated him began to pay dividends. He sold his first three editions to Pallas Gallery in London and then entered a relationship with London Contemporary Art who sold out many of his meticulously worked multi plate etching editions.
In 1997 he was rewarded with the accolade of the UK best-selling artist award shortlist, despite competing with a hand made editions program against mass produced editions. Again in the year 2000 he was short listed for the awards, this time in two categories: Best selling published artist overall and best selling original print artist. He won outright the Artist's Print Award for being the best selling artist in the UK of original hand finished prints. The prizewinners were chosen from a detailed poll of the fourteen hundred retail art galleries in the United Kingdom who are members of the Fine Art Trade Guild.
In 1998 a management company, Simon Bull International Ltd., was formed to handle the marketing of the painter's prolific output and in 1999 a separate corporation, Simon Bull International Inc., was established in the US to represent his increasingly important US program.
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